Marriage Project, Day 4

It does seem, too often, that we all have collective amnesia. Meet my guest for today’s Marriage Project:

As an atheist, I don’t consider my marriage to be a covenant with God. I feel marriage is a vital social institution. The right to create a family should be universal. It is our kin, whether consanguinal, affinal, or fictive, that provide us with the community our species craves and needs to survive. The legal recognition we are afforded means that I have a partner who can speak for me when I cannot, who can make decisions for me when I am impaired, and I can feel safe that my proxy is the person who knows me the best, loves me best, wants the best for me. Our children will belong to us both, legally. Should something happen to one of us, the child(ren) would not be removed from the parent they still have. We have a recognized status in our culture as a married couple, which affords us respect in ways that couples without this legal distinction are unfortunately denied. The fact that all these social, financial, and legal privileges are handed to us because we have the “correct” genitalia in the “correct” combination is obscenely offensive.

It is so incredibly difficult in this life to find someone you truly love, who truly loves you, and be able to actually make it work, that if you are lucky enough to find that, I honestly don’t think that anyone in this world or any other should have the power to tell you that you can’t have it. My partner’s first marriage would have been against the law once upon a time, and many of the same arguments against interracial marriage are being brought up again, as if we have collective amnesia.

Making the decision to commit your life to the person you love should not be devalued because of the parts of the people involved. We are all more than the sum of our parts. A government that denies the rights of its citizens based on such arbitrary distinctions has no right to call itself a democracy. I support marriage equality because it is absolutely unthinkable to me that the institution of marriage should be limited to the cis population. Humanity is a wildly, wonderfully diverse spectrum, and the ways in which we express love and family and commitment to one another are the most beautiful things about us, in my opinion. I can think of nothing more joyous than being able to witness all of my friends and family being given the same ability to create family, feeling that satisfaction and sense of oneness that comes with recognizing the basic human-ness of this act. I feel this warmth of community, of recognizing the same instinctual drive for family and love in others that I feel in my bones, at every wedding I attend. Whether or not it is legally recognized.

Chae Hoban
Spokane, WA